For Arthritis Sufferers, Coping Is Common Bond

September 11, 1986|By Lisanne Renner of The Sentinel Staff

Nobody even guessed arthritis. Cathy Kitchen was only 24 when her fingers and elbows began to ache. One doctor told her she was too young for arthritis, said she probably had a fractured wrist and braced it with a splint for four weeks.

Four months later Kitchen visited another doctor who suspected rheumatoid arthritis. ''Arthritis never ran through my mind,'' said Kitchen. ''When I was told I had arthritis I must have sat there in silence for 10 minutes trying to grasp the fact that I had this horrible disease that only gets old people.''

After all, it's always gray-haired women who suffer arthritis in aspirin commercials, and ''morning stiffness'' is one of those vague complaints uttered by grandparents.

''I'm not old enough. This can't be possible,'' Kitchen thought when she first heard the diagnosis two years ago.

It's a widespread misconception that arthritis comes only with age, like wrinkled skin and gray hair. True, a hefty share of the nation's 37 million arthritis sufferers are at least into middle age, but even babies can get arthritis.

The most common type of arthritis, osteoarthritis, affects 16 million Americans and about 80 percent of them are older than 40. However, there are about 100 different types of arthritis, and combined they generally strike people between the ages of 20 and 50.

A small fraction of sufferers are even younger than that -- more than 100,000 children have juvenile arthritis. And though they are small in numbers compared with others who share their disease, about 42,000 Americans between ages 18 and 35 cope with arthritis.

Like Kitchen, it took Tom Juneman several months to find out that he had rheumatoid arthritis, the second most common type. When he was a college senior and began waking up with shoulders so stiff that brushing his teeth meant agony, he at first blamed the stiffness on his workout routine of swimming and weight lifting. Doctors said he probably wasn't stretching and warming up enough before exercising.

Several months later, while body surfing, his hip began to throb with a pain that didn't subside for hours. Eventually doctors figured out that Juneman the jock, 24 years old, had arthritis.

Rae Lemke was a high school cheerleader when doctors initially diagnosed a knee problem as rheumatoid arthritis. Later they learned she had lupus, a type of arthritis that affects 100,000 Americans, most of them women of childbearing age. Lupus can cause skin rashes and kidney failure as well as painful joints.

The word arthritis literally means ''joint inflammation,'' and it describes a disease that causes joints to swell, ache and stiffen, making movement painful and sometimes leading to deformity. Arthritis holds the ignoble title of America's No. 1 crippling disease.

One young arthritis sufferer compares the pain and stiffness in her joints to the creaky movements of the rusty tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz. Juneman put it this way: ''You wake up every morning feeling like you'd played a rough game of football the day before.'' Kitchen described it as a throbbing pain that is dull and constant, like a toothache.

Its cause remains elusive, but there are likely many because there are so many different types of arthritis. Researchers suspect several causes: A virus may trigger joint inflammation, for instance, or sufferers may have an inherited susceptibility to arthritis. People with osteoarthritis may have been born with defective cartilage or with slight defects in the way their joints fit together and move. They also may have overworked their joints, such as the football players who develop arthritis in their knees.

When arthritis -- a controllable but incurable disease -- arrives in midlife, it brings physical and emotional upheaval and sometimes disrupts careers and demands changes in lifestyle. Young adults between 18 and 35 who have arthritis have a slightly higher divorce rate than their healthy peers and a much higher unemployment rate, according to the National Arthritis Foundation.

Juneman, now 33, quit his five-year job as a nurses' aide because the heavy lifting and hours on his feet aggravated his arthritis. For the past year he has been an accountant for Waterbed Room Land in Orlando, and although his fingers ache by the end of the workday, he no longer has the recurring flare-ups of intense pain that many arthritis sufferers endure.

Juneman also toned down his carousing -- less drinking, less Frisbee playing, less dancing -- in favor of more rest, therapeutic swimming and a healthier diet. ''I just had to change my lifestyle,'' he said. ''I couldn't fight it arthritis because that doesn't work.''

Lemke decided to leave college, where she was studying social work, because the stress of finals and other activities triggered flare-ups that sent her to the hospital. Hospital stays, one as long as five weeks, forced her to take grades of ''incomplete'' in her classes.